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Thin Mint-Daniel Rosner’s New Edge Mustang finds sweet success in street car trim

Posted By: Steve Baur
Written by Ainsley Jacobs
Photography by Kevin DiOssi

 
Involved in drag racing both personally and professionally for as long as he can remember, Daniel Rosner was born into a racing family. A dedicated street-car enthusiast, Daniel steadily built his 2003 Ford Mustang GT project over the years, and the car eventually rewarded him by racking up the wins in NMRA TorqStorm Superchargers True Street competition.
 
Daniel’s parents, Paul and Shelley Rosner, both were longtime members of ProMedia’s NMRA/NMCA family, as Paul worked as an editor and photographer for the series’ magazine starting in 1999 and Shelley worked in the registration trailer.
 
“My dad later worked at a few Mustang magazines, but we’ve traveled since I was little to every NMRA and NMCA race that we could,” Daniel shared of his youth spent growing up at various drag strips across the country.
 

Although he and his father often worked on Paul’s ProCharged 2001 Ford Mustang at home in St. Louis, Missouri, Daniel focused on his education in his teen years rather than racing. In college, he emphasized his studies and purchased a Ford Focus as a daily driver rather than something to race.
 
“Well, they were running a Ford Focus bracket challenge over at World Wide Technology Raceway [in St. Louis] and I entered, wound up going to the final, and won the race,” laughed Daniel of the unexpected win in 2013. “I’ll never forget it, because I wasn’t a part of the club that was running it and guys were booing me over the fence on my way back to the pit!”
 
Around the time he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 with a degree in engineering, Daniel bought a 2006 Mustang GT with a Three-Valve 4.6-liter V-8 under its hood. That same year, he raced his New Edge Mustang at the NMCA race in St. Louis in True Street. “I won the 13-second group and also won the 13-second True Street at Fun Ford Weekend in St. Louis, too, which was cool,” he recalled of his first few outings. 
 
Wanting to improve his time slips, Daniel hit the track any time he could and worked hard to run a 12-second number. One day, he noticed that the density altitude was down in the negative numbers, so he quickly packed up and headed out.
 
“I went by myself, brought a 20-pound bag of ice, disconnected the front sway bar, iced the car down, and ran my first 12-second pass that night,” he proclaimed proudly of the occasion.
 

With school behind him and a money-hungry hobby ahead, Daniel found full-time employment in the industry he loved. He spotted an online job posting from ProCharger for a position and applied, even though it required some experience he didn’t yet have. “I figured, why not? If I got it, it would be cool,” said the proactive prospect.
 
Much to his delight, Daniel got a phone call from the company and was hired on as a Product Development Engineer. He relocated to Kansas and began working on developing superchargers for street and race applications.
 
Following in his parents’ footsteps, though, Daniel also joined the NMRA family as a part of the staging team in the mid-2010s alongside his brother, Randy Rosner, who worked in tech.
 
“The whole thing has been a huge family experience for me,” noted the man, now 30 years old. “I enjoyed working there, but eventually decided to race and I couldn’t do both.”
 

In 2015, Daniel sold his Three-Valve S197 and picked up a 2003 Ford Mustang GT in its place. The New Edge was a bit of a basket case, as it had a 5.4-liter Navigator engine already in place with a single eBay turbocharger setup, but it wasn’t complete or tuned.
 
“It was quite the journey to get that car home,” he laughed. The second-gear synchronizers in the Mustang’s stock five-speed manual TR-3650 transmission were less-than-ideal and Daniel knew he had a lot of work ahead of him. “I decided to model this car after my dad’s ’01 that we worked on together. I learned everything from that car.” 
 
Working out of a small garage at his apartment complex, Daniel found a complete 4R70W transmission swap kit for sale and completed the work. By 2016, Daniel’s Mustang was consistently running 11-second passes. He planned on running it at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois, but the trip wound up being a huge headache.
 
“My family and I had taken the car out there the week before to a friend’s house to put a new downpipe on, and he wound up not working on it,” Daniel stated of what wound up being a last-minute, late-night thrash session to get the car buttoned up. “Also, the rearend had gone out on the trip there, so I had to rebuild it, too.” Despite the drama, Daniel was able to get his New Edge sorted out enough to collect his first 10-second timeslip.
 

“At the end of the year, a screw came out of the throttle body blade and went through the motor,” he lamented of the carnage that ensued. Undeterred and still working out of his apartment’s small garage, Daniel pulled the engine and set about rebuilding it as the pistons had been nicked.
 
“I didn’t have money for a new rotating assembly, so I found some stock Mach 1 pistons on Facebook Marketplace, took the rings off my pistons, put them on the Mach 1s, put those in the motor, and ran it like that for a year.”
 
The risky move actually worked out fairly well, and Daniel continued cruising the streets and blasting the strip with his New Edge stallion. Satisfied with its performance, he turned to his brother, Randy, to improve the Mustang’s appearance in 2017.
 
Randy suggested a bold, eye-catching mint shade that Daniel was dead-set against initially, but he trusted his brother and allowed Randy to spray the hue at Hughes Auto Body where he works. Not long after, Daniel was attending an event at US 36 Raceway in Missouri and 1320 Video chose to feature his car. He jokingly referred to it as “Thin Mint” and the name stuck.
 
The following year, Daniel and his wife, Lydia, purchased a home with a two-car garage. With more room to work on his projects, Daniel quickly ditched his Mustang’s turbocharged setup in favor of one from ProCharger instead.
 
“I had been getting to the point of needing CO2 for the wastegate and controllers and stuff with the turbo combination,” explained Daniel of why he opted for the power-adder swap. He knew that instead of upgrading to a larger turbo, he could simply bolt-on a similarly sized blower and gain nearly 200 horsepower. “Plus, the street capability of the ProCharger is really awesome.”
 

He started with a P-1X self-contained supercharger and custom-created a kit for his car using the manual mills at his employer.
 
“I maxed that deal out pretty quickly, though. One morning, I went to drive the car to work and all of a sudden it started making unhappy noises, so I shut it off and pushed it back to the house,” he said. A secondary timing chain failed, and while the engine itself had been spared any significant damage, Daniel used the opportunity to build something better.
 
He disassembled the Four-Valve modular engine and had Noland's Cylinder Head Service port the stock Navigator heads. Using a stock, iron GT500 block machined 0.10 over by Siebert Performance, Daniel handled the assembly process himself and used a set of 10:1 compression ratio Wiseco pistons that he got thanks to Vic Ellinger.
 
“I put in some K1 connecting rods, used a stock Navigator crank, and Todd Warren-spec Lunati cams,” Daniel continued.
 
Daniel installed the finished 331 cubic inch 5.4-liter Four-Valve modular engine along with his 4R70W transmission refreshed by Freddy Brown, along with a Precision Industries torque converter and TCI outlaw shifter.
 
Although he had been happy with his P-1X, Daniel also used the opportunity to upgrade to a more potent ProCharger an F-1A-94.
 

The combination proved to be successful, as Daniel clinched the 9-second True Street win at the Nitto Tire NMRA/NMCA Super Bowl of Street Legal Drag Racing presented by HPJ Performance at World Wide Technology Raceway in St. Louis, Missouri, in August of 2020, then backed it up with another 9-second True Street win at the NMRA All-Ford World Finals and Holley Intergalactic Ford Festival at Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky in October of 2020.
 
Knowing he couldn’t drive all the way to Kentucky, though, he purchased a truck two weeks prior to the start of the race, but couldn’t bring himself to commit to buying a trailer, too. Instead, he rented a U-Haul trailer and wound up using that setup for the remainder of the year as well as the entire next season.
 
“In Bowling Green, it kept breaking belts and I couldn’t run an 8-second pass no matter what I did. Everything that could happen did happen, so that run didn’t happen,” he noted, still happy overall with his achievement and with how the new blower had performed. “The boost curve with the new ProCharger is awesome. I can get 20 psi within .8 seconds and then throughout the run I’m flatlined at 24 psi and that’s hard to beat.”
 
As always, Daniel pressed forward. In 2021, he was able to attend two NMRA True Street events, again in St. Louis and Bowling Green.
 

In Missouri in mid-May, on what was his first pass right off the trailer, Daniel’s Mustang went 8.69 at 159 mph in the quarter-mile.
 
“It was awesome to finally be in the eights,” he explained. “My wife, Lydia, was there and she’s so supportive—she’s my crew chief, so that was great. And my family was there, too. They were going crazy on the starting line.”
 
The celebrations were short-lived, though, as a vacuum line blew off the bottom of the engine’s intake manifold on Daniel’s third trip down the dragstrip. With zero boost, the rouge run severely affected his three-pass average and he was out of contention for a win in True Street.
 
By the time summer turned to fall, Daniel was ready for his do-over. Racing yet again in True Street in Kentucky, he suddenly found himself facing wild wheelie issues.
 
“The car stood up on its bumper two or three times,” he confessed. “On Saturday, it took a chunk out of the track that they had to repair and then rain came through and my weekend was over.”
 

With a less-than-ideal finish to his 2021 season, Daniel spent the off-season sorting out Thin Mint. Sharad Raldiris at UPR Products was instrumental in assisting with the suspension setup and corrections, and Daniel installed a new K-member, A-arms, and more. His struts bent during the wheelie mayhem, so he replaced them with a new set from Strange. Similarly, his oil pan had sustained some damage, so that was upgraded as well.
 
Other updates and upgrades, such as a new upper intake elbow and replacing the old air-air intercooler with a new air-water unit from ProCharger were also on the bill for Daniel, who estimates his Four-Valve engine produces between 1,000 and 1,100 horsepower on pump E85 fuel.
 
To date, the 3,420-pound Mustang has run a quickest elapsed time of 8.69 seconds at 159 mph in the quarter-mile and 5.58 seconds at 127 mph in the eighth with a best 60-foot time of 1.23-seconds on the back tire.
 
“I love True Street and have won a number of other events, including Street Car Takeover and a few small-tire shootouts at local tracks,” he added, proud of his project’s prowess. For Daniel, it’s the challenge of building a fast street car that can survive the required 30-mile cruise and the brutal back-to-back blasts on the 1,320. “It really is difficult, but it’s also a lot of fun and, other than the two in 2021, I’ve completed every one I’ve been to.”
 

Looking ahead, Daniel plans to continue racing Thin Mint in NMRA TorqStorm Superchargers True Street for 2022 with both St. Louis and Beech Bend indelibly inked on his calendar. Additionally, he also intends to run in the new NMRA SunCoast Performance 8.60 Street Race heads-up category, as his 8.50 Team Z roll cage installed by Charlie Bowne, Jr. makes the Mustang eligible to compete. Regardless of where he runs, Daniel is excited about the prospect of picking up a winner’s circle photo with his newborn daughter, Molly, in attendance.
 
From his youth spent following his parents on the racing circuit to now he doing the same with his own family, Daniel has built a life that allows him to pursue his passion with the people he loves the most. From growing his career at ProCharger by day to racing his Thin Mint 2003 Mustang GT with the NMRA on the weekends and even occasionally driving it to work, Daniel is surrounded by the one thing that’s more important to him than anything else—his family.
 

The Details

Owner/Driver
Owner/Driver: Daniel Rosner
Hometown: Olathe, Kansas
Occupation: Product Development Engineer, ProCharger
Class: True Street/8.60 Street Race
Crew: Lydia Rosner (crew chief), Molly Rosner
Car Year/Make/Model: 2003 Ford Mustang GT
Powertrain 
Engine: 5.4-liter Four-Valve V8
Engine builder: Built by Daniel Rosner, Machine Work by Siebert Performance/Nolands Cylinder Heads
Displacement: 331 cubic inches
Block: Stock Iron GT500 Block
Bore: 0.10 over
Stroke: Stock
Crank: Stock Navigator Crank 
Rods: K1 Rods
Pistons: Wiseco
Heads: Ported Navigator Heads
Valvetrain: Ford
Cam type: Todd Warren-spec Lunati 
Carburetor or EFI system: Holley HP
Power-adder: F1A-94 ProCharger
Fuel brand and type: Pump E85
Headers and exhaust: Pace Setter Long Tubes
Transmission: Ford 4R70W automatic
Transmission Builder: Freddy Brown
Clutch/shifter/torque converter: Precision Industries Converter/TCI Outlaw Shifter
Rearend: Ford 8.8-inch w/ Strange Spool and 9-inch ends
Chassis 
Body and/or chassis builder: Team Z 8.50 installed by Charlie Browne Jr
Suspension (Front): UPR Products
Suspension (Rear): UPR Products/Viking Shocks
Brakes (Front): Strange Engineering
Brakes (Rear): Stock
Wheels (front): Billet Specialties
Wheels (Rear): Billet Specialties
Tires (Front): M&H
Tires (Rear): Mickey Thompson
Aftermarket body modifications: Randy Rosner Paint Job at Hughes Auto Body
Safety equipment: Tim McAmis Window Net/RJS harnesses
Vehicle weight: 3,420 pounds
Quickest ET: 8.69 second (quarter mile) and 5.58 seconds (eighth mile)
Best 60-foot: 1.23 seconds
Fastest mph: 159
Sponsors: ProCharger, UPR Products, Wiseco, True Motorsports
 

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